Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Everywhere she went she asked people if they’d seen Thomas. To her great alarm she was surprised by how many said he was dead. She was shocked by how many insisted there had never been such a man. Every once in a while someone claimed to have spotted him, perhaps even recently; someone told her he’d been seen with the Indians, a thin giant shadow walking with them along the ridge of the mountains.

She did what she had to do. When there was no food left she worked for those who would feed her. When there was no work she begged on the road until her voice was gone. When there was nothing but her body to give for a place to sleep then she gave it. Twice she was captured as a slave when she couldn’t produce proof of her freedom, and twice she escaped because both times her captors expended themselves in the pleasure of her. She hated both of them enough to kill them with her knife, but as she’d grown older she had become shrewder about the politics of murdering white men, about the relentlessness with which white people would hunt her down for it. So she didn’t avenge her violations but fled them.

She searched a long time. She crossed the great river that lay to the west, and continued on where neither white man nor black had gone, into the land of the red. She collapsed one winter’s day from cold and exhaustion and hunger in the middle of a field of snow, and when she woke she was in an Indian tent with several women who were admiring the jewelry from her box. She stayed with the Indians through the winter. She gave them the jewelry. Now all she had was the knife. With it she drew for the Indians pictures in the dirt of a tall man with a head of flame; but she had trouble communicating to them his whiteness, since she was now so far west some hadn’t seen a white man. For a while in her own mind Sally pictured Thomas as she supposed the Indians did, black in the sun. Often in her imagination she made him blacker than she. She stripped him nude and placed irons around his ankles and chained his arms, and rode along behind him on her horse, the reins in one hand and a whip in the other.

In the spring she set out again, on a new horse and blanket, wearing the clothes the Indians had given her. She crossed land as red as the Indians, land so red she could only believe the Indians who lived on it had emerged straight from the ground made of its rich red dirt. She rode as the Indian woman of an unknown tribe, and when she met other tribes and they asked her to identify her own, sometimes she said Virginia and sometimes she said Paris, and sometimes she tried to say another word that she’d been trying to say a long time, except it had caught in the ventricles of her heart like her own name in the ventricles of a strange vision she’d once had. For the remainder of her journey the word rested there and she couldn’t clear her heart or throat of it, she couldn’t bring it to her lips. Under the searing sun of the summer she rode, concentrating on nothing but saying it, and she didn’t finally say it until she’d found him.

She found him in an Indian village high on a mesa that overlooked the world as far as she could see it. She stumbled onto the village by chance, meeting some Indians at the foot of the mesa and allowing them to lead her up the path along the mesa’s side. They offered her a place to sleep and took her to an adobe house that waited on the other side of a narrow stone bridge that crossed the main mesa to a smaller one. The bridge was so narrow and high that, as she crossed, she didn’t dare look anywhere but straight ahead. The house was empty and cool. Some water was in a bowl. Some blankets were in the corner where she could sleep.

As she was falling to sleep, she had a dream. She dreamed she was back in the Hotel Langeac on the rue d’X, back in the bedroom where she’d slept with Thomas. She dreamed it was once again that night when he’d told her they were going home and she’d been devastated by the realization of how she’d miss him, as possessor and master and father, if she stayed behind in Paris. In this dream she once again reached behind the headrest of the bed and took the knife from the red Parisian glove and, as she had that night, raised the knife above her head and brought it down into him. Except this time no moths flew from the bed. This time she could hear the wet sound of the rip of the knife and she knew she’d killed him. When she dreamed this, the word that had been caught in the ventricles of her heart loosened itself and floated up to her throat; she could feel it on the back of her tongue. The knife slipped from her fingers.

She heard it fall to the floor. Which was odd, because she was sleeping on the floor, and there was nowhere for the knife to fall.

She heard a strange sound in the room, and it took her some time to identify it as music, playing very low. At some point, in the low clouds of her sleep, there was also the shriek of a siren, like the alarm of an air raid.

The word was between her teeth. She wanted to bite it in two and taste its blood.

In her sleep she raised her fingers to her mouth and tasted blood after all. Dimly she looked at her fingertips as though pieces of the word would be there.

“America,” she said. She woke and there was blood on her pillow. There was blood on the sheets of the bed beneath her. Someone was lying in the bed with her and his head was flowing with blood; and she was startled to have found him again, and wanted to ask what had happened to him and where he’d gone, except that she knew he couldn’t answer. Then in the next moment she forgot her dream entirely, only the flotsam of it washing in and out with the tide of her consciousness; and though the tall man in the bed next to her looked familiar, she could no longer remember his name. The music suddenly stopped and she heard the click of the radio. She sat up in the hotel room to look at the two men in suits at the foot of her bed. One was a very large black man and the other was a small white man with red hair. The black man bent over to pick up the knife from the floor and stood there for some time, holding it in a handkerchief and turning its bloody blade over and over.

She looked again at the dead man next to her. She was now awake enough to cry out, and she rose from the bed too fast, becoming dizzy. “Take it easy, Mrs. Hemings,” the large black man said. He put the knife in the handkerchief over on a table in the corner of the room and took Sally by the arm to steady her.

“Married name is Hurley,” said the small, wiry white man. He was reading from a note pad that he pulled from his coat pocket. “Hemings is her own name.”

The black man pulled a chair from the table and sat Sally down. The room was stark. No pictures hung on the dirty white walls and there was no furniture besides the bed and the table and the chairs. On the table were the knife, now forming a small pool of blood, and the radio that had been playing. Besides the door that led out into the hotel hallway there were two other doors, one of them to the toilet where there were a sink and faucet but no bath or shower. The other door was next to the bed.

“Mallory, is that guy still out in the hall?” the black man said to the other one, who turned and opened the door and signaled to the hotel concierge in the hall. The concierge was a fat man with a handlebar mustache; he was pale and breathing heavily. He tried not to look at the bed where the body was. “Where’s this go?” the black man said to the concierge, pointing to the door by the bed.

“That’s been shut up as long as I’ve been here,” the concierge said. Bringing himself to look at the body, he blurted, “I don’t like this in my hotel.”

The black man went over to the door by the bed and opened it. The concierge made a sound of surprise: behind the door was nothing but a wall of dirt. Some of the dirt fell into the room. The black man touched the dirt wall and looked at his fingers; he gnawed on the inside of his cheek, which he tended to do when he was confused. “This has been opened recently,” he said. He looked at the dirt trickling into the room through the door. “Someone tried to get out through here,” he said. Then he walked back over to the table where Sally was sitting in a daze. She stared at her hands in her lap. The black man sat down in the other chair and looked at her. “Now then, Mrs. — ” he started. “Damn,” he muttered, and turned to Mallory.